Field’s odd blogging position, flopping like a landed fish between wide-eyed nostalgia for the purple mountains majesty and abstruse, barely coherent critiques of what he believes to be the failings of his alma mater. — S. Aidan Finley ’04

[Y]ou are not making “empirical claims” but are hopelessly entangled in ideological commitments. We don’t take you seriously because you do not deserve, intellectually, to be taken seriously.. — Professor Sam Crane

So, c’mon, DDF. Let’s step it up. Let’s see you do something other than complain, toady, pontificate, toady, complain. It gets old, and all the fancy formatting in the world doesn’t alleviate the thoughtless, thread-bare, nature of your commentary. — S. Aidan Finley ’04

I have been insulted by Aidan Finley and, you, abl, are no Aidan Finley!

;-)

]]>By: ablhttp://ephblog.com/2017/10/09/to-the-record-editorial-board-do-your-job/#comment-211452
Mon, 09 Oct 2017 17:33:15 +0000http://ephblog.com/?p=42065#comment-211452I also vote no. Among other things, you’re picking apart things in a way that is not particularly fair to the authors of the op-ed (and therefore not particularly productive).

A great example comes in one of the two block quotes of the editorial you provide in your post:

The editorial concludes with:
“Additionally, it is well understood that SAT scores are a poor metric of the quality of academic work that will be undertaken when a student comes to the College.”

Then why does Williams use them!

There is an obvious responses to this: SAT scores can be a poor measure and, yet, if they are the best measure available, still be useful. I think you know this.

Continuing on this point, the Record editorial actually notes that SAT scores are a poor measure of the quality of academic work, not that SAT scores are a poor measure of undergraduate GPAs. Although grades are somewhat reflective of academic work quality, I think we would all readily acknowledge that they are not perfectly predictive. And this lack of predictiveness is not going to be random: students who are good test takers are going to over-perform on the SAT and on classroom tests relative to the quality of work that they produce.

But this is a relatively minor quibble. A bigger issue with your point comes when you later state that SATs scores “are an outstanding predictor of the grades that students will get at Williams” and then link to an article in which you conclude that “the academic rating (AR) used by places like Williams (details here) works moderately well in predicting academic performance.” Now, taking aside whether that’s a fair conclusion to draw from your post (and given that the expert that you interview in that post states that AR “explains less than 40% of [the] variation,” I think it’s a characterization that definitely errs on the generous side), it’s a very different conclusion than what you provide in the above post.

Ironically, you’ve done a lot of what you are “embarrassed” about the Record doing–spinning facts to suit your rhetorical points, overstating your rhetorical points, taking things out of context, etc. If you, as a late-career professional, are going to characterize the writing of current college students as “factually suspect or childishly naive”–and you probably shouldn’t irrespective of the quality of that writing–you should work harder to ensure that your own points don’t make the same mistakes. This is what makes your writing look like bullying: it is full of rhetorically loaded, but often meatless, attacks.

]]>By: David Dudley Field '25http://ephblog.com/2017/10/09/to-the-record-editorial-board-do-your-job/#comment-211446
Mon, 09 Oct 2017 17:05:38 +0000http://ephblog.com/?p=42065#comment-211446I am a slave to my readers’ desires. No more on this Record editorial.
]]>By: Healthy Ephhttp://ephblog.com/2017/10/09/to-the-record-editorial-board-do-your-job/#comment-211445
Mon, 09 Oct 2017 17:00:32 +0000http://ephblog.com/?p=42065#comment-211445Jesus, Dave — when are you going to learn the first lesson in how not to be a bully?: Punch up, not down.

You are a grownup professional who has had academic afiliations at multiple colleges and universities. You are proposing a week to pick apart undergraduates. That’s pretty much the definition of a bully.